Warning: Proposed e-cigarette rules could devastate public health

A public health expert has expressed serious concerns about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s proposed regulations on electronic cigarettes.

Writing on his blog, Dr. Michael Siegel, who is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, said that with the release of its deeming regulations, the FDA was poised to give a huge gift to combustible tobacco and to the diseases and death caused by cigarettes.

“If promulgated as is, the regulations will be devastating to the public’s health by protecting the combustible cigarette market at the expense of the introduction and promotion of much safer alternative products that would otherwise have the potential to substantially reduce lung disease, heart disease, stroke, and cancer,” he writes.

Siegel focuses on two major aspects of the deeming regulations that he says would deal a devastating blow to the public’s health:
1. Electronic cigarette companies cannot inform consumers that these products are safer than cigarettes, and they cannot even tell the public that they are free of tobacco.
2. The regulations put a huge, if not insurmountable, obstacle in the way of new and innovative electronic cigarette products.
Siegel’s blog is at http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/.